OpenAIRE-Connect: Open Science as a Service for repositories and research communities

Communication presented at "12th International Conference on Open Repositories" (OR 2017), Brisbane, Australia, 26-30 June 2017.OpenAIRE-Connect fosters transparent evaluation of results and facilitates reproducibility of science for research communities by enabling a scientific communication ecosystem supporting exchange of artefacts, packages of artefacts, and links between them across communities and across content providers. To this aim, OpenAIRE-Connect will introduce and implement the concept of Open Science as a Service (OSaaS) on top of the existing OpenAIRE infrastructure1, by delivering out-of-the-box, on-demand deployable tools in support of Open Science. OpenAIRE-Connect will realize and operate two OSaaS services. The first will serve research communities to (i) publish research artefacts (packages and links), and (ii) monitor their research impact. The second will engage and mobilize content providers, and serve them with services enabling notification-based exchange of research artefacts, to leverage their transition towards Open Science paradigms. Both services will be served on-demand according to the OSaaS approach, hence be re-usable by different disciplines and providers, each with different practices and maturity levels, so as to favor a shift towards a uniform cross-community and cross-content provider scientific communication ecosystem

OpenAIRE infrastructure and services: advancing Open Science

13th International Open Repositories Conference, June 4th-7th, Bozeman, Montana, USA.OpenAIRE has established itself as a key and sustainable infrastructure for giving access to Open Access publications in Europe and beyond, progressively providing access to datasets, software and other research artefacts. From its outset, OpenAIRE has pursued a service-driven design to engage all stakeholders and the current service portfolio (covering all e-Infrastructure layers) targets a variety of users, namely researchers, content providers, funders and research communities. OpenAIRE infrastructure is currently able to deliver a set of relevant services for content providers managers. The OpenAIRE Literature Broker Service is a tool operating on top of the OpenAIRE information graph and supports repository managers with a web dashboard where they can monitor all their repositories and can view the enrichments suggested by the information graph. Funders can currently benefit from a set of services to monitor research outputs and impact and to integrate a body of resources in their ecosystems. OpenAIRE has now successfully applied the model and services developed for the European Commission to other funders, mainly from European Union. OpenAIRE is working closely with existing Research Infrastructures and research communities to extend its service portfolio by introducing two new services implementing the concept of “Open Science as a Service”: Research Community Dashboard and Catch-All Broker Service. OpenAIRE-Advance, the new phase of OpenAIRE infrastructure, continues the mission of OpenAIRE to support the Open Access and Open Data mandates in Europe. By sustaining the current infrastructure, comprised of a human network and technical services, it consolidates its achievements while working to shift the momentum among its communities to Open Science, aiming to be a trusted e-Infrastructure within the realms of the European Open Science Cloud.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Proposal for an IMLS Collection Registry and Metadata Repository

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign proposes to design, implement, and research a collection-level registry and item-level metadata repository service that will aggregate information about digital collections and items of digital content created using funds from Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) National Leadership Grants. This work will be a collaboration by the University Library and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. All extant digital collections initiated or augmented under IMLS aegis from 1998 through September 30, 2005 will be included in the proposed collection registry. Item-level metadata will be harvested from collections making such content available using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI PMH). As part of this work, project personnel, in cooperation with IMLS staff and grantees, will define and document appropriate metadata schemas, help create and maintain collection-level metadata records, assist in implementing OAI compliant metadata provider services for dissemination of item-level metadata records, and research potential benefits and issues associated with these activities. The immediate outcomes of this work will be the practical demonstration of technologies that have the potential to enhance the visibility of IMLS funded online exhibits and digital library collections and improve discoverability of items contained in these resources. Experience gained and research conducted during this project will make clearer both the costs and the potential benefits associated with such services. Metadata provider and harvesting service implementations will be appropriately instrumented (e.g., customized anonymous transaction logs, online questionnaires for targeted user groups, performance monitors). At the conclusion of this project we will submit a final report that discusses tasks performed and lessons learned, presents business plans for sustaining registry and repository services, enumerates and summarizes potential benefits of these services, and makes recommendations regarding future implementations of these and related intermediary and end user interoperability services by IMLS projects.unpublishednot peer reviewe

Search Interoperability, OAI, and Metadata: Handout for METRO Workshop

Handout for the workshop on the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting given for METRO on December 8, 2006

Towards business model and technical platform for the service oriented context-aware mobile virtual communities

The focus of existing virtual communities is centered on a particular product or social interaction and the role of mobile devices is restricted to exchange a limited amount of contents. Herewith we envisage that the upcoming virtual communities will exploit the potential of social interaction and context information to offer personalized services to its members and mobile devices will play a significant role in this process. As a step towards this direction, in this paper we propose a business model for the mobile virtual communities in which the mobile device takes on the role of a content producer and content consumer. Though there are a number of research issues which need to be addressed to realize such virtual communities, in this paper we focus on the service requirements, architecture and open source software implementation of a technical platform for the content producer and consumer mobile devices

If you build it, will they come? How researchers perceive and use web 2.0

Over the past 15 years, the web has transformed the way we seek and use information. In the last 5 years in particular a set of innovative techniques – collectively termed ‘web 2.0’ – have enabled people to become producers as well as consumers of information. It has been suggested that these relatively easy-to-use tools, and the behaviours which underpin their use, have enormous potential for scholarly researchers, enabling them to communicate their research and its findings more rapidly, broadly and effectively than ever before. This report is based on a study commissioned by the Research Information Network to investigate whether such aspirations are being realised. It seeks to improve our currently limited understanding of whether, and if so how, researchers are making use of various web 2.0 tools in the course of their work, the factors that encourage or inhibit adoption, and researchers’ attitudes towards web 2.0 and other forms of communication. Context: How researchers communicate their work and their findings varies in different subjects or disciplines, and in different institutional settings. Such differences have a strong influence on how researchers approach the adoption – or not – of new information and communications technologies. It is also important to stress that ‘web 2.0’ encompasses a wide range of interactions between technologies and social practices which allow web users to generate, repurpose and share content with each other. We focus in this study on a range of generic tools – wikis, blogs and some social networking systems – as well as those designed specifically by and for people within the scholarly community. Method: Our study was designed not only to capture current attitudes and patterns of adoption but also to identify researchers’ needs and aspirations, and problems that they encounter. We began with an online survey, which collected information about researchers’ information gathering and dissemination habits and their attitudes towards web 2.0. This was followed by in-depth, semi-structured interviews with a stratified sample of survey respondents to explore in more depth their experience of web 2.0, including perceived barriers as well as drivers to adoption. Finally, we undertook five case studies of web 2.0 services to investigate their development and adoption across different communities and business models. Key findings: Our study indicates that a majority of researchers are making at least occasional use of one or more web 2.0 tools or services for purposes related to their research: for communicating their work; for developing and sustaining networks and collaborations; or for finding out about what others are doing. But frequent or intensive use is rare, and some researchers regard blogs, wikis and other novel forms of communication as a waste of time or even dangerous. In deciding if they will make web 2.0 tools and services part of their everyday practice, the key questions for researchers are the benefits they may secure from doing so, and how it fits with their use of established services. Researchers who use web 2.0 tools and services do not see them as comparable to or substitutes for other channels and means of communication, but as having their own distinctive role for specific purposes and at particular stages of research. And frequent use of one kind of tool does not imply frequent use of others as well

Survey and Analysis of Production Distributed Computing Infrastructures

This report has two objectives. First, we describe a set of the production distributed infrastructures currently available, so that the reader has a basic understanding of them. This includes explaining why each infrastructure was created and made available and how it has succeeded and failed. The set is not complete, but we believe it is representative. Second, we describe the infrastructures in terms of their use, which is a combination of how they were designed to be used and how users have found ways to use them. Applications are often designed and created with specific infrastructures in mind, with both an appreciation of the existing capabilities provided by those infrastructures and an anticipation of their future capabilities. Here, the infrastructures we discuss were often designed and created with specific applications in mind, or at least specific types of applications. The reader should understand how the interplay between the infrastructure providers and the users leads to such usages, which we call usage modalities. These usage modalities are really abstractions that exist between the infrastructures and the applications; they influence the infrastructures by representing the applications, and they influence the ap- plications by representing the infrastructures